Workshop: Digital-age approaches to early modern engraved, etched, and imprinted episteme. Images, objects, materials and methods.

The international workshop interrogates how prints vitally contributed to the early modern construction of targets of heuristic inquiry. The event brings together diverse incised, etched and engraved images, objects and materials produced c. 1500-1700 to reframe a comparative history of the rise of the ‘epistemic imprint’ across cultural, religious, and geographic divides as superintendent technology for aestheticizing knowledge formation rendering imperceptible entities accessible to the senses, from the interdisciplinary perspective of international academic researchers and museum professionals trained in different fields and drawing on diverse methodological approaches.

The event also seeks to expand the notional epistemic imprint to consider paper instruments, pictures, diagrams and their woodblock and copperplate matrices; engraved metal instruments including armillary spheres, clocks, globes, quadrants and astrolabes; their constitutive materials (wood, metal, ink, paper) and impressed and incised geometric lines; as well as the early telescope, a device that generated images via imprinting. Of particular interest is consideration of methods, approaches and projects employing digital humanities technologies and re-enactment strategies to investigate and produce new understandings about early modern epistemic imprints, their making, and the forms of knowledge and personae they helped to make in turn.

It is organized by Ruth S. Noyes, with the support of the Novo Nordisk Fonden and the National Museum of Denmark.

The workshop is open to the public free of charge. Pre-registration is required, please contact:
Ruth S. Noyes, Novo Nordisk Fonden Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Research Fellow, National Museum of Denmark
Ruth.Sargent.Noyesnatmus.dk
Olivia Friis Uhrbrand, Workshop Assistant Coordinator, National Museum of Denmark
Olivia.Friis.Uhrbrandnatmus.dk


PROGRAM

Thursday 7 November
National Museum, Room U2 (Ny Vestergade 10)
Sessions chair: Hannah Wiepke

9:00-9:30 Arrival, registration and coffee
Michael Andersen, Head of Research and Collections—Middle Ages, Renaissance and Numismatics—National Museum of Denmark
Welcome

SESSION 1

9:30-10:15 Alex Wragge-Morley
“Epistemic Images and Aesthetic Experience”

10:15-11:00 Tawrin Baker
“The Uses of Images of the Eye in Anatomy and Optics from Vesalius to Descartes”

11:00-11:30 Coffee

SESSION 2

11:30-12:15 Caroline Fowler
“Spectral Ships: Hercules Segers and Traces of Early Capital”

12:15-13:00 M.K. Foster
“Sharks in the Archives: Reimagining Fossils as Epistemic Artifacts”

13:00-14:00 Lunch, Restaurant Smør, National Museum (provided for speakers)

SESSION 3

14:00-14:45 Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen
“Filling in the gaps: Historical remaking as a methodology to research early modern botanical episteme”

14:45-15:30 Nick Wilding
“Skull, Moon, Flea: the afterlife of the image”

15:30-16:00 Coffee

SESSION 4

16:00-16:45 Eileen Reeves
“Imprinting Instruments”


Friday 8 November
National Museum, Room U2 (Ny Vestergade 10)
Sessions chair: M.K. Foster

SESSION 5

9:00-9:45 Julia Ellinghaus and Volker Remmert
“Imageries on Early Modern Scientific Instruments”

9:45-10:30 Daniel Margócsy and Mark Somos
“The Census Method: Uncovering Editions, Provenance, Annotations in the Case of Early Modern Books and Prints”

10:30-11:00 Coffee

SESSION 6

11:00-11:45 Stephanie Leitch and Britta-Juliane Kruse
“Visual Tools and Searchable Science in Early Modern Books”

11:45-12:30 Jolien Van den Bossche
“Digital resuscitation of the Officina Plantiniana’s woodblock collection: goals, approaches and new technologies”

12:30-14:45 Free time for lunch

14:45 Departure from Hotel Danmark for excursion for speakers and guests to Kronborg Castle and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art


Saturday 9 November
The Black Diamond at the Royal Danish Library, Holberg meeting room (Søren Kierkegaards Plads 1)
Sessions chair: Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen

SESSION 7

9:00-9:45 Arrival and viewing of items from Special Collections

9:45-10:30 Emma Perkins
“Tycho Brahe’s instrument illustrations: a new visual language of technology?”

10:30-11:00 Coffee

SESSION 8

11-11:45 Shira Brisman
“Globes as Gifts in the Era of Print”

11:45-12:30 Hannah Wiepke
“The ‘Interactive’ and ‘Knowing’ Print”

12:30-13:30 Lunch, Royal Library (provided for speakers)

SESSION 9

13:30-14:15 Stephanie Porras
“Forgetting how to see”

14:15-15:00 Meghan Doherty
“Tracking the Philosophical Transactions through the (Digital) Archive”

15:00-15:30 Coffee

SESSION 10

15:30-16:15 Evelyn Lincoln
“The Theater that was Rome”

16:15-17:00 Ruth S. Noyes
Closing discussion